EvaPaterson.com

This November, the people of California will be asked to vote on a question of equality, fairness - and love. For the first time, California's gay and lesbian couples are able to celebrate their lives together on equal terms under state law by entering into the civil institution of marriage.

An initiative on the November ballot seeks to change the California Constitution and take from them that opportunity. Californians should say "no" to the proposed amendment and ensure that our Constitution continues to stand for our best hopes and our highest aspirations.

A constitution is the founding document of a community. It is the statement of principle that protects the ability of all people in that community to live their lives and pursue their dreams. The same constitution that protects the right of churches and religions to decide when to recognize marriage as a sacrament - and the right of every citizen to express their opinions about the issue - also protects the right of gay and lesbian people to be treated equally under state law. That is what the California Supreme Court said last month, and the court was right.

This epic battle has personal relevance for me. In 1970, I fell in love with Gary Paterson, who is white, at the height of the Black Power movement.

Our love antagonized both black and white people.

The Supreme Court had struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage just three years before in the landmark case, Loving vs. Virginia.

When we decided to marry, Gary's parents were so appalled that first we eloped to Hawaii and then settled in Oakland.

Gary did not speak to his parents for almost seven years. We had epithets yelled at us in public.

What gay men and lesbians are experiencing now as they seek to marry feels very familiar to me. The state has no right to tell anyone who they can or cannot love or marry. That is why this ballot initiative is misguided and cruel.

There are good people who continue to hold different beliefs about marriage for gay and lesbian couples. But amending our state Constitution is different. Writing a statement of inequality into the founding document of our state affects everyone's status in our community. It would say to some Californians that they are second-class citizens. We have gone down that road before, and we know where it leads.

That is why Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and U.S. Sen. Barack Obama have both clearly stated their opposition to the proposed California constitutional amendment, even though they do not personally support marriage for gay and lesbian couples. they are opposed because a constitution is different. If a European-American Republican governor and an African-American Democratic presidential candidate can agree on that principle, then I believe the people of California can rally around it as well.

Committed, loving gay and lesbian couples will begin legally marrying next week. Do not take their marriages away from them in November.

We are stronger as a community when we come together to strengthen all of our relationships. Divided, we are weaker.

Our state Constitution has a long history of reflecting the best of California, and bringing out the best in its people, guided by principles of fairness and equality. By rejecting this amendment in November, we protect what is best about our Constitution by ensuring that marriage - and the rights and responsibilities it entails - remains available to all couples.

The San Francisco Chronicle published this opinion piece on Friday, June 13, 2008.

The California Supreme Court ruled today that two people in a committed and loving relationship deserve the dignity and support that come with marriage.

We celebrate today’s decision as a historic triumph for fairness and opportunity in our society.  The Court has said that California is a place where everyone has the chance to realize his or her hopes and dreams.

When I think of this historic moment, I'm reminded of Mildred Loving, whose landmark 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia allowed two people of different races to marry.

She said last year on the 40th anniversary of the decision that she wasn't out to 'make a political statement or start a fight.' They were in love and they wanted to be married.

Mildred Loving was a woman of color and her husband-to-be Richard was white, and at that time people believed it was okay to keep them from marrying because of their ideas of who should marry whom.

The Equal Justice Society is committed to realizing the Constitution's promise for all Americans – which includes LGBT couples receiving fully equal treatment under our state’s marriage laws.

We are proud to be one of many organizations that filed friend of the court briefs supporting the parties in these cases that sought equal status under the law. And we applaud the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Lambda Legal, ACLU and Equality California for their incredible efforts in turning a vision of fairness and opportunity into reality.

As a racial justice organization, we joined their efforts not only because it was right, but also because EJS strongly believes in working with others to ensure that the rights of all are expanded, rather than diminished, in our society.

Guest Post By Lee Cokorinos

The issue of race has roared back into public discourse, like Freud’s return of the repressed. The feel good moment when even Ward Connerly sent a campaign check to Barack Obama and—in an echo of Freud’s famous “what do women want?”—the late William F. Buckley anxiously struggled to grasp “what is it, concretely, that he wants?” has passed.

It’s unlikely that Connerly would write that check today. But the race baiters and silent bigots will undoubtedly be writing more checks to Connerly now as he pushes forward with his crusade to outlaw affirmative action in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska.

The right-wing media and think tank infrastructure—which some liberals and progressives, in a fit of overconfidence and hubris, have prematurely declared dead—has sprung into action in the wake of the controversies over Clinton finance committee member Geraldine Ferraro’s racially-charged remarks about Obama, and concerning his relationship with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

There is a feeding frenzy in the conservative movement to take advantage of this new moment of racial ugliness. Like aging hawkers desperately competing to sell Confederate Flag T-shirts at a Lynryd Skynyrd revival, Human Events, National Review and the Murdoch media (from Fox News to the Weekly Standard) instantly filled their pages, websites and broadcasts to the bursting point with sedate but cutting analysis, raw white male anger, "friendly" advice and general bloviating about racial issues with Obama as the focus.

Human Events started the ball rolling in January when it released a 33-page exposé trashing Obama’s candidacy. This was followed by a heated exchange on March 1 between Rev. Wright and Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

Since then, all of the leading lights of the anti-diversity industry have weighed in with abuse, advice and glee at the spectacle of a woman and an African American Democratic candidate beating each other up in the media.

Joining the fray have been ex-Meese Justice Department spokesperson Terry Eastland (who now works for Murdoch’s Weekly Standard); Peter Kirsanow of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission; former Connerly legal sidekick Edward Blum (now at the American Enterprise Institute fighting for repeal of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act); and Weekly Standard writer Stephen F. Hayes (who proudly and gratuitously fit into the biotag of his article denouncing Obama that he was “a consultant on the 1996 campaign for California’s Proposition 209”).

The level of analysis has been low. Clearly Buckley’s talent for giving intellectual flair to reactionary politics is sorely missed at National Review. For instance, Linda Chavez equated the dedication by Senator Obama’s church to being “a congregation with a non-negotiable commitment to Africa” and to “the historical education of African people in [the] Diaspora” with “the promotion of a racist ideology.”

Is commitment to solidarity with the people of Africa, and supporting an understanding by African Americans of their own history now to be considered racist? If so, then it's fair to say that in its current racial fury the right-wing has blown clear past its hard-learned lessons of the mid-20th century and is now plumbing the history of the 19th century, when Black education was illegalized and American policy toward Africa consisted of the slave trade and gunboat diplomacy. 

Indeed the analysis in National Review has been so dimwitted that even Charles Murray—co-author of The Bell Curve and no slouch in the game of feeding racial tensions—was moved to blow off his colleagues’ shallow carping comments in National Review Online about Obama’s speech by calling it “just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America.” He was joined in his dissent by Abigail Thernstrom, another prominent intellectual capo in the anti-diversity industry.

Several strands have emerged out of this blizzard of conservative racial hucksterism. The Right’s first gambit was to try to get Obama to renounce his commitment to affirmative action (he opposed Proposal 2 in Michigan banning affirmative action).

“If he’s really intelligent,” writes Center for Equal Opportunity president Roger Clegg, then Obama would line up with the anti-diversity industry—i.e., him. Mickey Kaus, the conservative blogger, likewise suggests that Obama can “escape from the ghetto” and “shock hostile white voters into taking a second look at his candidacy” by finding “a Sister Souljah … not a person, but an idea” and renouncing his support for affirmative action.

Richard Kahlenberg, riding his class-based affirmative action hobby horse and pointing to Connerly’s initiatives as a litmus test of Obama’s bona fides, has also weighed in with the naïve and flaccid argument that Obama could win over the white working class by renouncing affirmative action that takes account of race.

It’s as if the right-wing, elite-funded anti-diversity industry, backed by billionaires such as Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife, is suddenly going to rally to a program of class-leveling in education. As sociologist Peter Dreier points out, upper crust whites in the wealthy suburbs have tended to vote far more conservatively on race issues than working class whites, and this goes double for conservative plutocrats.

It’s also not too much of a stretch to say that after a generation’s worth of race-baiting—by politicians from both major parties, cable TV schlock pundits and the anti-diversity academics who provide intellectual cover for them—that it will take more than a little policy tweaking on affirmative action to end the divisive role of race in the white working class and bring about the kind of new consensus that Obama was talking about in his speech.

Far more promising, as Dreier points out, would be a broad and sustained campaign—transcending election cycles and including honest discussions of race—to build unity around economic inequality and collapsing working class standards of living. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Scaife and Murdoch to fund that kind of think tank or independent movement.

A second strand of abuse to come out of the right-wing firestorm against Obama was to accuse him, as the Wall Street Journal did, of playing the race card by “detecting racial overtones where none exist” and “crying wolf on race.” Considering the drumbeat of racializing demagoguery that this candidate has endured after trying to avoid the racialization of his campaign by the media and his opposition, this is a bit like robbing a person of his clothes at gunpoint then accusing him of being poorly dressed.

But the most important question is this: What will be the lasting impact of the mainstream and fringe racist attacks against Obama on the legal and political system? It’s clearly going to have an effect on the general election and the Democratic Party. Both the McCain and Clinton camps probably see the controversy over Obama’s former pastor as benefiting their campaigns.

This will spur and sustain the feeding frenzy, with potentially lasting damage to race relations. But it will also likely produce newfound financial support for the anti-diversity industry, as it strives to raise money by keeping race issues on the boil in a negative and divisive way. The right-wing’s attack on Obama and Connerly’s statewide campaigns are two sides of the same coin. As Connerly pushes forward with his crusade to outlaw affirmative action in five states it is vitally important that he be confronted and stopped, difficult as that will be.

Moreover, if people stay away from the polls in November as a result of the outcome of the Democratic nomination process, this will harm the fight against Connerly’s initiatives. If the right can drive the wedge between the feminist and civil rights movements even deeper, this may do lasting damage. Both have important stakes in the survival of affirmative action and policies to promote diversity, and if they come together the battle can be won, as was seen in the successful campaign to defeat Connerly’s Prop 54 initiative in California. The battlefield is being shaped beyond this election cycle.

Lee Cokorinos conducts political research on right-wing movements and organizations. He is the author of The Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice (Rowman & Littlefield), and Target San Diego: The Right Wing Assault on Urban Democracy and Smart Government, and can be reached at rightnotes@earthlink.net.

Putting race back on the table has been a primary goal of the Equal Justice Society since our founding in the summer of 2000. We felt and still feel that race is a topic that makes many people uncomfortable or angry and is therefore avoided. We also have seen the devastating impact of this avoidance.

Over the past eight years, EJS has addressed race in a variety of arenas-law, art, public education, the federal judiciary, and the delivery of health care, to name a few. When the race for the presidency began (it seems it began two decades ago), we heard many people saying that race will no longer be an issue. That America has finally transcended race. We laughed.

As a tax-exempt organization, EJS is prohibited from taking positions on individuals running for office. As individuals, many of us on the staff have endorsed candidates. That is our right. We have also been mesmerized by how race been handled, mishandled, and mangled during the campaign.

Earlier this month, we decided to issue a special online newsletter focusing on race and the presidential campaigns. We're still working on the issue and will release it in the next week.

But then yesterday, Senator Obama gave an amazing speech on race. Our friends Michelle Alexander and Alvin Starks remarked on the fact that the speech went well beyond the parameters of a political campaign. We at EJS agree. Many of the themes sounded by the Senator are ones EJS has addressed since before the time anyone had ever heard of Barack Obama.

For example, we are currently struggling with how to talk about affirmative action in a way that resonates with white Americans. Obama's candid acknowledgement of the resentment many whites have for affirmative action resonated with our experience over the 12 years since the passage of Proposition 209 in California. His statement that we need to heal racial wounds was reflected in the transformative talk given by Dr. Shakti Butler at last year's Judge Constance Baker Motley luncheon.

When we heard and read the speech, we wanted to tie it to our work. This morning, we received an amazing article written by Tim Wise, someone I have admired for years. We met at a Radical Lawyering Conference at Yale Law School in 1998. He was the keynote speaker at the Lawyers' Committee's Dr. Martin Luther King luncheon in 2003. Tim is a leader in the anti-racism movement.

Some of you have already received this article. My friends john powell and Sonia Greer forwarded it to me. Some of Tim's statements will be controversial to some of you but his central thesis is right on point. We are delighted that race is back on the table.

Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia:

Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth

By Tim Wise
Published March 18, 2008, on lipmagazine.com

For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.

Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?

Well actually, no he didn't.

Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save American lives."

But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we're the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."

And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.

Finally, although one can certainly disagree with Wright about his suggestion that the government created AIDS to get rid of black folks--and I do, for instance--it is worth pointing out that Wright isn't the only one who has said this. In fact, none other than Bill Cosby (oh yes, that Bill Cosby, the one white folks love because of his recent moral crusade against the black poor) proffered his belief in the very same thing back in the early '90s in an interview on CNN, when he said that AIDS may well have been created to get rid of people whom the government deemed "undesirable" including gays and racial minorities.

So that's the truth of the matter: Wright made one comment that is highly arguable, but which has also been voiced by white America's favorite black man, another that was horribly misinterpreted and stripped of all context, and then another that was demonstrably accurate. And for this, he is pilloried and made into a virtual enemy of the state; for this, Barack Obama may lose the support of just enough white folks to cost him the Democratic nomination, and/or the Presidency; all of it, because Jeremiah Wright, unlike most preachers opted for truth. If he had been one of those "prosperity ministers" who says Jesus wants nothing so much as for you to be rich, like Joel Osteen, that would have been fine. Had he been a retread bigot like Falwell was, or Pat Robertson is, he might have been criticized, but he would have remained in good standing and surely not have damaged a Presidential candidate in this way. But unlike Osteen, and Falwell, and Robertson, Jeremiah Wright refused to feed his parishioners lies.

What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock--though make no mistake, they already knew it--is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that "everything changed." To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.

But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.

This is what James Baldwin was talking about in his classic 1972 work, No Name in the Street, wherein he noted:

White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded--about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through their entire lifetimes in this euphoric state, but black people have not been so lucky: a black man who sees the world the way John Wayne, for example, sees it would not be an eccentric patriot, but a raving maniac.

And so we were shocked in 1987, when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall declined to celebrate the bicentennial of the Constitution, because, as he noted, most of that history had been one of overt racism and injustice, and to his way of thinking, the only history worth celebrating had been that of the past three or four decades.

We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we're shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation--we're literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.

Whites are easily shocked by what we see and hear from Pastor Wright and Trinity Church, because what we see and hear so thoroughly challenges our understanding of who we are as a nation. But black people have never, for the most part, believed in the imagery of the "shining city on a hill," for they have never had the option of looking at their nation and ignoring the mountain-sized warts still dotting its face when it comes to race. Black people do not, in the main, get misty eyed at the sight of the flag the way white people do--and this is true even for millions of black veterans--for they understand that the nation for whom that flag waves is still not fully committed to their own equality. They have a harder time singing those tunes that white people seem so eager to belt out, like "God Bless America," for they know that whites sang those words loudly and proudly even as they were enforcing Jim Crow segregation, rioting against blacks who dared move into previously white neighborhoods, throwing rocks at Dr. King and then cheering, as so many did, when they heard the news that he had been assassinated.

Whites refuse to remember (or perhaps have never learned) that which black folks cannot afford to forget. I've seen white people stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country--when they discover that such events were not just a couple of good old boys with a truck and a rope hauling some black guy out to the tree, hanging him, and letting him swing there. They were never told the truth: that lynchings were often community events, advertised in papers as "Negro Barbecues," involving hundreds or even thousands of whites, who would join in the fun, eat chicken salad and drink sweet tea, all while the black victims of their depravity were being hung, then shot, then burned, and then having their body parts cut off, to be handed out to onlookers. They are stunned to learn that postcards of the events were traded as souvenirs, and that very few whites, including members of their own families did or said anything to stop it.

Rather than knowing about and confronting the ugliness of our past, whites take steps to excise the less flattering aspects of our history so that we need not be bothered with them. So, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, site of an orgy of violence against the black community in 1921, city officials literally went into the town library and removed all reference to the mass killings in the Greenwood district from the papers with a razor blade--an excising of truth and an assault on memory that would remain unchanged for over seventy years.

Most white people desire, or perhaps even require the propagation of lies when it comes to our history. Surely we prefer the lies to anything resembling, even remotely, the truth. Our version of history, of our national past, simply cannot allow for the intrusion of fact into a worldview so thoroughly identified with fiction. But that white version of America is not only extraordinarily incomplete, in that it so favors the white experience to the exclusion of others; it is more than that; it is actually a slap in the face to people of color, a re-injury, a reminder that they are essentially irrelevant, their concerns trivial, their lives unworthy of being taken seriously. In that sense, and what few if any white Americans appear capable of grasping at present, is that "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best," portray an America so divorced from the reality of the times in which they were produced, as to raise serious questions about the sanity of those who found them so moving, so accurate, so real. These iconographic representations of life in the U.S. are worse than selective, worse than false, they are assaults to the humanity and memory of black people, who were being savagely oppressed even as June Cleaver did housework in heels and laughed about the hilarious hijinks of Beaver and Larry Mondello.

These portraits of America are certifiable evidence of how disconnected white folks were--and to the extent we still love them and view them as representations of the "good old days" to which we wish we could return, still are--from those men and women of color with whom we have long shared a nation. Just two months before "Leave it to Beaver" debuted, proposed civil rights legislation was killed thanks to Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. One month prior, Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus called out the National Guard to block black students from entering Little Rock Central High; and nine days before America was introduced to the Cleavers, and the comforting image of national life they represented, those black students were finally allowed to enter, amid the screams of enraged, unhinged, viciously bigoted white people, who saw nothing wrong with calling children niggers in front of cameras. That was America of the 1950s: not the sanitized version into which so many escape thanks to the miracle of syndication, which merely allows white people to relive a lie, year after year after year.

No, it is not the pastor who distorts history; Nick at Nite and your teenager's textbooks do that. It is not he who casts aspersions upon "this great country" as Barack Obama put it in his public denunciations of him; it is the historic leadership of the nation that has cast aspersions upon it; it is they who have cheapened it, who have made gaudy and vile the promise of American democracy by defiling it with lies. They engage in a patriotism that is pathological in its implications, that asks of those who adhere to it not merely a love of country but the turning of one's nation into an idol to be worshipped, if not literally, then at least in terms of consequence.

It is they--the flag-lapel-pin wearing leaders of this land--who bring shame to the country with their nonsensical suggestions that we are always noble in warfare, always well-intended, and although we occasionally make mistakes, we are never the ones to blame for anything. Nothing that happens to us has anything to do with us at all. It is always about them. They are evil, crazy, fanatical, hate our freedoms, and are jealous of our prosperity. When individuals prattle on in this manner we diagnose them as narcissistic, as deluded. When nations do it--when our nation does--we celebrate it as though it were the very model of rational and informed citizenship.

So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred? What we can say is that such a place is signing its own death warrant. What we can say is that such a place is missing the only and last opportunity it may ever have to make things right, to live up to its professed ideals. What we can say is that such a place can never move forward, because we have yet to fully address and come to terms with that which lay behind.

What can we say about a nation where white preachers can lie every week from their pulpits without so much as having to worry that their lies might be noticed by the shiny white faces in their pews, while black preachers who tell one after another essential truth are demonized, not only for the stridency of their tone--which needless to say scares white folks, who have long preferred a style of praise and worship resembling nothing so much as a coma--but for merely calling bullshit on those whose lies are swallowed whole?

And oh yes, I said it: white preachers lie. In fact, they lie with a skill, fluidity, and precision unparalleled in the history of either preaching or lying, both of which histories stretch back a ways and have often overlapped. They lie every Sunday, as they talk about a Savior they have chosen to represent dishonestly as a white man, in every picture to be found of him in their tabernacles, every children's story book in their Sunday Schools, every Christmas card they'll send to relatives and friends this December. But to lie about Jesus, about the one they consider God--to bear false witness as to who this man was and what he looked like--is no cause for concern.

Nor is it a problem for these preachers to teach and preach that those who don't believe as they believe are going to hell. Despite the fact that such a belief casts aspersions upon God that are so profound as to defy belief--after all, they imply that God is so fundamentally evil that he would burn non-believers in a lake of eternal fire--many of the white folks who now condemn Jeremiah Wright welcome that theology of hate. Indeed, back when President Bush was the Governor of Texas, he endorsed this kind of thinking, responding to a question about whether Jews were going to go to hell, by saying that unless one accepted Jesus as one's personal savior, the Bible made it pretty clear that indeed, hell was where you'd be heading.

So you can curse God in this way--and to imply such hate on God's part is surely to curse him--and in effect, curse those who aren't Christians, and no one says anything. That isn't considered bigoted. That isn't considered beyond the pale of polite society. One is not disqualified from becoming President in the minds of millions because they go to a church that says that shit every single week, or because they believe it themselves. And millions do believe it, and see nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

So white folks are mad at Jeremiah Wright because he challenges their views about their country. Meanwhile, those same white folks, and their ministers and priests, every week put forth a false image of the God Jeremiah Wright serves, and yet it is whites who feel we have the right to be offended.

Pardon me, but something is wrong here, and whatever it is, is not to be found at Trinity United Church of Christ.

One of our goals is to promote a better understanding of the role of race in the pursuit of more progressive public policies and jurisprudence, two areas that will be undeniably impacted by the election of our next president.

The twist and turns of the primary contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have generated speculation and anaylsis on how race and gender have played a role in the decisions made by primary voters.

Through this email and on our EvaPaterson.com blog, we share with you links to some blog posts and articles on race, gender and the election to stimulate discussion on these issues.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, we do not advocate for or endorse political candidates. The viewpoints of the articles' authors are their own and do not reflect the positions of the Equal Justice Society.

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Same Script, Different Day
By Alan Jenkins
ourfuture.org, January 29, 2008

For those of us who study the interaction of race, politics and the media, the events of the last few weeks in the Clinton-Obama electoral slugfest were painfully familiar: A white candidate or that candidate's surrogates say or do something that African Americans will find racially insensitive, but that is likely to go over the heads of other Americans and, especially, white voters. When the black candidate's supporters react, complaining of racial insensitivity, the white candidate's camp displays feigned bewilderment and invokes the "racial sensitivity as racism" script. Read the full post

Gender, Race and the Presidential Election —  Sally Kohn & Gloria Steinem Debate
Posted by Sally Kohn
movementvisionlab.org, January 12, 2008

Recently in the New York Times, Gloria Steinem argued that if Barack Obama was a woman, he wouldn’t be elected. That’s probably true. Ms. Steinem then concludes that gender “is probably the most restricting force in American life.” That’s definitely false. Or, rather, a false choice. The reality is that racism and sexism are both profound and pervasive throughout our society. Ranking different forms of oppression is a ridiculous waste of time. We should be working to eradicate all forms of oppression, not deciding which one takes precedence. Read the full post

Black Women Talk Barack
By Amy Alexander
TheNation.com, January 24, 2008

The other day, my daughter announced her support of Senator Hillary Clinton's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. I asked why, and she answered, "It would be awesome to have a woman President." (She is 8 years old.) When I asked why not Senator Barack Obama, she paused, a slight crease developing between her eyebrows. Read the full post